• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Joint Public Issues Team

Churches working for peace and justice

  • Home Page
  • Who We Are
    • Six hopes for society
  • Issues
    • Economy
      • Tax Justice
      • Reset The Debt
      • Living Wage
    • Environment
      • Net Zero In My Neighbourhood
    • Poverty and Inequality
      • The Cost of Living Crisis
      • Universal Credit
      • Truth and Lies
      • Enough
      • Rethink Sanctions
      • Faith in Foodbanks
      • Housing and Homelessness
    • Asylum and Migration
      • Refugees
      • End Hostility
      • The Asylum System
    • Peacemaking
      • The Arms Trade
      • Nuclear Weapons
      • Drones
      • Peacemaking resources
    • Politics and Elections
      • Elections
      • Meet Your MP
      • Art of the Possible
      • Brexit
    • Other Issues
      • International Development
      • Modern Slavery and Exploitation
        • Forced labour in fashion
  • Get Involved
    • JPIT Conference 2022
    • Newsletter
    • Events
    • Walking with Micah
  • Resources
    • Advent
    • 10 Minutes on… podcast
    • Politics in the Pulpit?
    • Stay and Pray
    • Season of Creation
    • Prayers
    • Public Issues Calendar
    • Poetry
    • Small Group Resources
  • Blog

Measuring Hunger – a big win for campaigners, and it’s only the beginning…

Poverty and Inequality, Uncategorised, Universal Credit · 1 March, 2019

On Wednesday the news broke that the Government was going to measure the level of hunger in the UK. This is a major victory for supporters of the End Hunger UK campaign, including the four Churches which work together in the Joint Public Issues Team. More importantly the scale of hunger in the UK can no longer be dismissed and ignored. It will be a reality that all Governments from now on will need to acknowledge and address.

Progress is happening – all too slowly for those who are struggling to feed their children – but progress none-the-less.

We have come a long way

The first step it happening – now lets fix it!

It is important to acknowledge how far we have come – as well as how far we still need to go.

When I started looking at UK poverty in 2010 the outlook was bleak. Public attitudes to people experiencing poverty were at an all-time low. The benefit system was seen as rife with fraudsters and “scroungers”, who suffered from a “culture of worklessness”.

Three types of failure – personal failure, failure to get work and failure to avoid poverty – were bound together and presented as one. The solution offered was to get tough – reduce their benefits and increase punishments for people believed to be not trying hard enough to get work.

The press was at times in a feeding frenzy, devouring stories that portrayed benefit claimants as morally degenerate – even linking murders of children to the supposed “welfare culture”. Politicians from across the political spectrum often joined in, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Government used its resources to produce inaccurate and insulting statistics that – to quote the Economist magazine – “floated out of [the DWP] into the public debate like raw sewage”.

This was the environment in which today’s social security policies were devised and it shows.

Happy New Year 2019

For the first time in a decade I woke up on New Year’s Day filled with hope that these things were going to change for the better. Now when the media phones me up, they don’t ask for stories of scroungers – or even what they hope would be uplifting “churchy” stories of scroungers redeemed. Today they are interested in real people’s lives, and are often open to being told difficult stories that don’t fit a simple narrative.

There is a growing understanding that the majority of people experiencing poverty are in work. That taxpayers and benefit claimants are not two competing groups, but often the same people. The British Social Attitudes Survey shows us that the general public’s attitudes towards people receiving benefits is becoming more positive, and today all sections of the press present stories describing the injustices of the benefit system.

Importantly the Government has realised that pretending there is no problem just looks ridiculous. After over 6 years of significant problems, the Government has finally acknowledged that all is not well with its flagship reform Universal Credit. Movement – however belated and begrudging – is happening.

Measuring food poverty is a big step forward because when the first data is published (Spring 2021) the denials of the past will no longer be an option and we will have a way of seeing if policies are genuinely reducing hunger.

Why we have this opportunity

The Special Rapporteur visits a foodbank in Newcastle – © Bassam Khawaja 2018

It would be nice to be able to say these changes came because of the hard work of campaigners such as ourselves.  Certainly we have had our part to play, but the sad reality is that this change arrived because the suffering caused by poverty in the UK has become too great to ignore. The UN Special Rapporteur’s report into UK Poverty describes this suffering all too harrowingly, but just as shaming is his description of our nation’s valiant attempts to keep ignoring the problem.

My fear, from meeting with officials and politicians, is that the default path will be to address the problems…until it becomes possible to go back to ignoring the suffering. The comfortable assumption that both poverty and wealth are deserved is currently hard to maintain – but many long to return to it.

Much more needs to be done – even with these small steps more families will be trapped in poverty next year than this. More children will grow up struggling in 2020 than 2019 – even though we know that a functional social security system could provide families with the solid platform they need to escape poverty.

What next

The Joint Public Issues Team workplan has as a key theme: “A society where those who are poorest are at the centre”.  This flows from our understanding of what Christians are called to do, and our belief that all people have a dignity and worth that should be valued and nurtured.

My hope is that we use this opportunity to ensure that those who experience poverty are so firmly embedded in how government and the media operate that they cannot be excluded. There are glimmers of hope. Poverty Truth Commissions are springing up around the country. Leeds PTC helped with this fantastic video on the Guardian website – it is worth 24 minutes of anyone’s time. In Scotland the new welfare system is co-designed by “experience panels” of people who use the benefit system. Project Twist it is telling a new story about poverty and the helping the media to reflect the complicated reality.

Change is coming – the default pathway is not good enough but with effort church members, congregations and Churches can be part creating “a society where those who are poorest are at the centre”.

Two more important targets that you can help to achieve:

  • An end to the five week wait for the first Universal Credit payment. Sign up to the #5weekstoolong campaign from Trussell Trust.
  • An end to the Benefit Freeze. This is the largest but least dramatic benefit cut. By 2020 it is expected to cost over 10 million families each year £800 each year.
    Since 2015 while prices go up benefits have stayed the same – cutting benefits by the rate of inflation each year. Inflation has been higher than predicted and so the cuts have been larger than expected but are still due to continue.
    Next year it will cut a further £1.6Bn and MPs from all parties are questioning if it can continue. In the run up to the Spring statement we need to push very hard on this.

Filed Under: Poverty and Inequality, Uncategorised, Universal Credit Tagged With: department of work and pension, DWP, Food, foodbank, Foodbanks, Hunger, poverty, Universal Credit

Paul Morrison

I am the policy advisor with particular responsibility for issues around the economy including poverty and inequality. Prior to working for the Methodist Church I was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College studying viral disease and vaccine design.

Previous Post: « UK Foreign Minister, Jeremy Hunt, tries to get Germany to reverse its decision to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia
Next Post: Living incomes for cocoa producers »

Primary Sidebar

Search

Recent Posts

  • JPIT’s Review of 2022
  • What does Government Support for Asylum Seekers really provide?
  • God with Us – the Refugees of Calais and Dunkirk
  • How can we respond to COP27?
  • Statement on the conclusion of the COP27 Climate Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
  • COP27 – what should we be looking for?
  • “He has filled the hungry with good things” – What we need from the Autumn Budget
  • What are the stories we should tell about the humanitarian crisis at Manston Airport Asylum centre?
  • How can we be sure that the products we buy are not the result of modern slavery?
  • Why I hate Warm Banks (and why my church is opening one)
  • How does our theology call us to challenge Poverty?
  • Introducing Alfie
  • Biden says nuclear risk is the highest since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
  • Churches respond to risk to benefit levels
  • Briefing on the ‘Mini Budget’ for the Enough to Live group
  • Introducing Hazel
  • Introducing Hannah
  • An energy cap announcement in three parts: the good, the absent and the ugly
  • Afghanistan and the UK – One Year On from the Fall Of Kabul
  • Inflation, interest rates and the poorest

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter

Footer

Follow us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Quick links

Stay and Pray
Politics in the Pulpit
Faith in Politics podcast
Public Issues Calendar
Useful Links

Our work

About Us
Meet the Team
Join the Team 
Internship
Our Newsletter

Contact us

25 Marylebone Road
London NW1 5JR

Tel: 020 7916 8632

enquiries@jpit.uk

Copyright © 2023 · Showcase Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in